Let’s face it – the new buzzword for many folks who have got out of PC repair and into offering services online is hosting websites, being a web consultant and search engine optimization but what does that mean?

Simply put: search engine optimization is making your website search engine friendly through various techniques to make a search engine index your page faster and your site becomes higher up on search engine results.

A web consultant uses their skills to design you a website and expand your online presence through web applications, hosting your website, advertising and search engine optimization. However, not every web consultant is the same.

Let me explain what to look for.
1. Hosting
Does your provider host their own servers, use shared hosting or have other hosting options, such as cloud based hosting?

This may not seem important to you but if your web consultant is overly relying on shared hosting, to cut costs or for the consultant’s inexperience on the system administrator end of running a physical server, you may be setting up yourself for failure and overpaying month after month.

Shared hosting is approximately $5.95 to $9.95 per month and many consultants host their clients on their business shared hosting while pocketing the rest each month when that money could be better invested in the consultant hosting their own virtual private server or dedicated server, which offers faster speeds, than shared hosting which is thousands of clients on one server. Common shared hosting providers are Go Daddy, Hostmonster, 1 and 1 Internet, Hostgator, etc.

For that price of one year of shared hosting, I could have your website hosted on it’s own server, have your server configured for peak performance, and all of your visitors would complement you on how fast your website is because if it was slow – they would tell you about it!

Shared hosting is dangerous because out of those thousands of clients on one server, a small percentage may be involved in malicious search engine result manipulation where the clients hosted on the same IP address, which is similar to a phone number for computer servers, and the search engine responds by penalizing all domain names on that shared IP address. I will get to more about search engines in the rest of my article.

A web consultant, who is reliant on shared hosting, will respond that what I am saying is untrue but you could look at the Alexa ranking of each domain name of that consultant then compare the results to my clients. The difference is night and day.

What should you ask about hosting?

• Do you use shared webhosting?
• If so, who is your provider?
• Can I see references of your clients?
• What are the Alexa ratings of your clients?

If your consultant hesitates or avoids answering these simple questions, which is meant more to protect you than anything, do not sign any contract and only agree to a month-to-month agreement similar to renting a house from a landlord and do not sign a contract similar to what you would find in a bank!

Hesitation shows their lack of communication and frustration shows a potentially bad business relationship! 

4. Search engine optimization (SEO)
SEO is becoming easily one of the biggest scams ran by dishonest web consultants. I see this every day and nothing upsets me more than witnessing a client being taken advantage of by a web consultant who is engaging in dishonesty.

Many web consultants claim that “SEO services” cost a monthly fee. This is absolutely incorrect and sure sign of a dishonest web consultant. There is minimal effort and mostly the time of the consultant to keep your website up on the top search engine results.

Examples:

• Avoiding shared hosting.
• Keywords.
• A well picked domain name that includes a keyword.

SEO is not:

• Not just submitting your website via a search engine submission form.
• Not outsourcing your website to the Phillipines for them to engage in prohibited behavior.
• Not engaging in search engine manipulation

The analogy of shared hosting could be let’s say you live in an apartment complex in a bad part of town. The rent is cheap, the service is bearable and you cannot afford anything else. In this apartment complex, there are drug dealers and gang members. The police start looking at you like you are one of them.

This is how Google looks at shared webhosting providers like Go Daddy, Hostmonster, 1 and 1 Internet, Hostgator, and other “bargain” providers who generally charge $5.95 – $9.95 per month for “unlimited”.

If there is a client on shared webhosting who is engaging in link farming, content duplication and other prohibited search engine tactics – the search engine will punish the entire IP address everyone who is using it on that shared hosting, similar to my bad apartment complex analogy.

If you think that you may be a victim of this, I could look up all the domains hosted on your shared hosting provider if you provide me your domain name, and I could point out some questionable websites which may prevent you from being displayed on Google and other search engines. I offer this to you for free and will even send you the link to the website that tells you who is on a particular IP address.

Keywords and a domain relevant to your keywords is another essential thing a web consultant should explain to you. “How do you want to be found on Google” is the question that consultant should ask you rather than their “I will have you the top result for everything” because SEO is a process that can easily take a year. For example, my client Breitling Autoworks, took less than a month to be one of the top results for “Jacksonville collision repair”.

If your web consultant relies on search engine submission forms, automated programs or outsourcing it to Filipinos – you are setting yourself up for major disappointment. I have never used a search engine submission form, an automated program or relied on outsourcing because if you are caught engaging in prohibited search engine manipulation, you risk being delisted by the search engine permanently such as Overstock.com who was caught manipulating results through backlinks on college websites – your revenue from your website could easily drop 60% if you run an ecommerce website and you would disappear off of the Internet overnight.

This normally happens when SEO is outsourced and the consultant sits back collecting upwards of $500 – $1000 per month while spending less than $100 per month for prohibited manipulation.

Outsourced SEO often involves spamming, link farming, irrelevant backlink building and other prohibited tactics. Spamming involves purchasing a program or hiring a spammer to leave comment spam linking to your site on every website on the Internet. Not only is it prohibited by search engines, it is illegal in many countries. Link farming involves artificially boosting your results by purchasing the ability to host links to your website, often on shared hosting sites, called “link farms” who’s sole intention is to inflate your search engine results artificially. Irrelevant backlink building is similar to comment spamming and is ineffective.

Breiting Autoworks has never relied on any prohibited search engine manipulation, never will and all my SEO is “in house”, done by myself. Your business to me and my reputation as a business man is too important for me to compromise what is right and what is wrong for monetary gain!

5. Advertising
Does your web consultant know anything about effectively using advertising campaigns to bring more traffic and customers to your website?  Advertising is an investment which may not see quick results like everyone wants, but if you have money in your budget for advertising – it may be very effective and lucrative for you.

Conclusion
Not every web consultant is a dishonest person and if you have been burned by one, do not think all consultants are the same. Ask for personal and work references, ask for a client reference and inquire how many clients they have. All that information I am more than glad to provide to anyone who requests it.

Eyes On Internet Technologies is constantly keeping up with trends in web hosting, advertising, search engine optimization, advertising and system administrating. I can host the smallest of websites for you to maintain a “virtual presence” or I can run a website for you that can handle thousands upon thousands of hits per hour which would not work on shared webhosting.

I have personal web projects that have went from the lowest of search engine results to the highest results in less than six months, which is a normal time frame. It is consistently the top result in many relevant search terms and phrases, while content farmers try to steal the information off my webpages to artificially boost their rankings on their shared webhosting.

If you would like a free consultation about what I can do for you and look at your webpage to see what services I can improve upon, contact me and I will get back to you as quickly as possible. I have been on the Internet since 1996 and self taught myself how to be a system administrator since 1999, with more experience and better solutions than system administrators who went to college.

Thank you